Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.

I've been reading the rebuttal to FATAL, that old chestnut of the RPGnet community, and whilst I don't want to get into the minutiae of internet disagreements I did start to think about the way in which an amateur of RPG design can go wrong. There are several obvious rules that I think we all know, but it can be very easy to lose sight of those simple rules. Here I think are the obvious one and I write this not so much to educate (there are plenty of better resources and designers to listen to than me) but to remind myself of the things that I want to use to make my game:

Keep It Fun- Obvious really, the problem with this is that what people think is fun is dependant upon your source of origin. Plundering tombs of an ancient necromancer is fun for some people but for others role-playing a paranormal investigation with interesting NPCs is fun. Ultimately you’ve got to go with your gut, choose to make something that you yourself would like to play, and hope that the system that evolves from this appeals to those people who share your interest. I prefer fantasy style games so it’s unlikely I could sway the Vampire of Call of Cthulu guys, and I think trying to make an all singing all dancing universal system would ultimately weaken what I’m trying to do with the game. I guess this leads on to:

Stick to your Goals- It’s important to know where you’re going, to have a clear vision of what you want your game to achieve, but it can be easy to get sidetracked. I’ve been writing EasyType for a while now and I’ve dabbled with lots of other ideas in setting and tone before I actually got a group together to play the damned thing, but I remained true to what I wanted; an easy to play beer and pretzels (or tea and crumpets, I’m English don’t-you-know?) kind of game, and I’d like to think I’m achieving that.

Be humble- Most of us, and by most I mean 99% of us, are not going to change the role-playing landscape with our homebrewed system, and that’s fine. However the one thing we should never do is announce ourselves as the second coming with a system that will cast all others and their followers into the sea for daring to defy the one true game. As far as I’m concerned it’s enough to make a competent system that is enjoyable to play, anything more than that is a bonus. Finally:

Keep. It. Simple. STUPID!- This is more a personal rule. Some people like complicated games with random hit locations and long critical hit charts, perhaps more complex rulings to make for realistic combat and the like. However for me this is a game and I want to play, and I wanted to make it for my friends who are pretty new to the whole gaming experience. I don’t mind adding some interesting flavour on top, but I must remember that for them simple is better than more crunchy, in-depth systems.

It’s easy to stray from these rules without thinking, you keep dreaming up cool stuff, crazy powers and weird monsters but every once in a while I want to look at these rules and ask myself ‘Did you get the basics right? Is it fun? Is it easy? Is it what you want to do?’ and if it ever isn’t I’ll have to pull it all down and start again, perhaps a little wiser than I was before.

Playing Easytype Chapter 1- The Ostensian Bazaar Incident

Long time no see.

Recently I started a new system and a new test group consisting of my girlfriend playing her cross dressing thief boy (Hitori) and his priestly guardian (Faud). We'd run a single session which found the dynamic duo in possession of a magical dwarven sword before we ended the session, the next time we added my girlfriend's buddy to the mix with her tiefling and had a long roleplaying encounter within the city of Ostensis where Hitori and Faud had gone to get the sword identified by Old Man Kilik.

This session was pretty low on actual mechanics, which was unfortunate since this group is in effect testing the rules in a controlled manner. However it was home to some of the best roleplaying I've ever gotten out of the group, with interesting characters popping up at every turn and possibly the best botched roll I have ever seen.

Let me set the scene, Kilik tells the party that they need to do something for him, taking from them the sword for analysis and asking a favour as repayment, to quiet the undead beneath Ostensis in the Nekumeth Cyst, however to gain entry they needed the find Brother Belubute, a local priest of Apeostis (A lawful deity and a group of Chaotic characters did not mix well) and he told them they would need to complete a ritual to teleport to the Cyst involving 7 fallow candles, 8 coins, a bar of silver and some drops of infernal blood.

The party hit the bazaar and they had the gold for what they needed, but being a chaotic lot they decided to follow the path of greed and steal the candles from a merchant. In broad daylight. In the middle of a busy bazaar. It's not as insane as it sounds.

Allow me to explain. Easytpe, the name of the new system I've been dabbling with works on a very simple system. You have a skill and a number in it from -1 to +3, Hitori being trained as a thief had a +0 and had snuck around using his stealth skill to blend into the crowd, so I gave him a +1 to his thievery attempt. Unfortunatly the dice were not with my girlfriend who proceeded to roll a 2 and was caught by not just the shop keeper but also the local guard. Running time had come.

With my usual party I could have expected this to devolve into a fight, a blokey lot we are and not adverse to rumbling with the guards, however these girls were little more crafty. Our friend decided she would start screaming "thief!", leading the guard to her and away from the actual thief, soon Faud did the same and Hitori slunk back into the crowd and blended in, sidled up to the merchant she'd just tried to steal from and slipped the candle off the counter. This time the roll was good and the party waltzed away with their prize.

This was a good session as I had done no planning for it, just come up with the setting and a couple of characters and some vague plot outline, the players really filled in the blanks and the system was unobtrusive and flexible, when dice were rolled there was no pause in the action and the flow was maintained. Furthermore my decision to not include social skills (relying instead upon players acting out their parts to a degree) was entirely justified when my girlfriend (playing androgenous crossdresser Hitori) attempted to seduce a merchant into giving them a deal on buying a silver candlestick, the roleplay was good (if a little creepy) and has laid down some good threads for future sessions.

Next session will be in the Nekumeth Cyst itself, an interesting localé that with enough time I'm sure the party will be able to get through and should set up the central thrust of our future story arcs, I will post more when we get around to it:

What we liked:

*Kilik, the old bastard
*The bazaar incident was awesome
*Scenario largely sandboxed

What we disliked:

*An absence of combat
*A bit short

What we learned:

*Sandboxing a game is entirely doable and Easytype is simple enough to allow it.

FIF and Dungeon Dive

Time to elucidate more upon the actual games Dice Junket is involved in making, of which details have been somewhat slim.

FIF is, at the moment at least, the name of our generic fantasy roleplaying game. The rules were penned by myself and are based in part upon White Wolf's Storyteller system. It operates based purely upon skills in which players have a number of dice. When attempting to complete a task they roll their dice and attempt to get a number of successes (3+ on a d6), success and failure being measured on whther they manage to make this roll.

It's been designed to be at once easy to play and easy to create scenarios for. Monster need very little planning and can be made on the fly along with traps and encounters with NPCs. It's designed to be a 'Beer & Pretzels' style game, one that can be picked up and thrashed by my friends with very little forwar planning.

Dungeon Dive is similar in principal but differs in execution. It's essentially a regression of FIF back to a single dice board game, with characters being simplified even further and put into a hack and slash kind of game, similar in principal to the old Warhammer Quest game. To this end it is my intention to use Pendraken's (http://www.pendraken.co.uk/fantasy.htm) line of fantasy 10mm miniatures and modular dungeon sets to create something a little more 'old school' and less roleplaying based.

More to come on both of these projects at later date.

Ammunition and Thin Ice

My friends seem to universally hate ammunition, and I find it difficult to disagree with them. Tracking numbers on a sheet, especially with something as oft used as a bow becomes a chore that will frequently get forgotten in the heat of battle or a particularly heated discussion of exactly how much that shot missed that troll by. To this end using a similar dice rolling mechanic used elsewhere in the system (in an effort to unify the process so the only thing my players need to ask is 'how many dice am I rolling?') I have attempted to give an abstract system for tracking ammunition for arrows, charges left in a wand or even days worth of rations left.

The concept is simple, each item such as a quiver of arrows has a number of dice assosciated with it when it is found/created between 1 and 5. At the end of any encounter or roleplaying phase (in the case of rations you would only have to roll after resting and making camp, which would constitute a phase of roleplaying) the owning player must roll the dice assosciated with the object, if there are any failures (1-2 on the d6) then the player must subtract 1 die permanently from the object. If this is the last die then the object has 'run out' of uses or ammunition and is destroyed or otherwise rendered useless.

For Example.
Terence the archer has been busy fighting a Deep Crow with his party, opening fire with his bow to fend of the deep lord of Power Dome A. Once the Deep Crow has been driven back into the dark crevice within the mantle of the world that it calls its home the Games Master decides that the encounter is over. Terence has a quiver with 3D worth of arrows within, so he rolls 3d6 and gets a 5, 1 and a 2. Since the 1 and 2 are failures Terence is forced to amend his character sheet where his 3D arrows lose a dice becoming 2D arrows.

However this is not the only way the system can be used to represent something other than character skills. Consider a river of thin ice that a party must cross thats thickness is defined by a number of dice and its durability by a Hp total. Each turn the ice must roll a test to see if it can endure the weight upon it, with a difficulty equal to the number of people currently crossing, ie a party of 4 crossing means difficulty 4. If it passes the test then it holds but if it fails it takes a point of damage, if it reaches 0 Hp then the ice buckles and anybody left on the ice falls into the water, most likely taking damage from the freezing damage and possibly being inflicted with hypothermia (to be discussed in a later article about status changing effects).

With a little bit of creativity the basic mechanics of the system can be adapted to work in a variety of situations which is pleasing as a single universal mechanic is much more memorable than several necissary to control several niché situations that might only come up once a campaign.

The System - Basic Principals

I needed a basic mechanic when devising my system, and in deference to my D&D roots I was initially compelled to make this a 'dice + stat > difficulty' system, a method that has worked well for me in the past. It was my initial plan to use four stats to define characters and a series of classes to define them and give them unique suites of skills. This was an entirely acceptable system and I'd done alot of work on it, including an interesting magic mechanic. However it still felt clumsy, the attributes were too broad and the classes largely similar to one another.

In response I cast my net out wide and looked for inspiration, something simple, quick but comprehensive. I was also determined to only use d6 since the more exotic types of dice are at a premium in our group and I didn't want to burden us with the need to buy more. Considering all this I began work on a system using the time honoured method of defining the difficulty of a task by a number of successes gained by rolling a certain amount on a number of dice, in a similar manner to 1st Edition Exhalted.

This in itself is not the most original of systems, but for my purposes it could be easily adapted for our setting, is fairly comprehensive and modified by our relativly inexperienced GM to sort all kinds of situations.

The system (as yet lacking the poncy moniker I usually give my game systems) works as thus; characters are principally composed of a series of skills, lacking any definable attributes such strength, in favour of a focus upon having the necissary training. In terms of assigning 'dice' characters have character points (Cp) which are used to buy dice for skills and also dice for their Hit Points, raising their Hp by an additional d6 at each level.

The basic cost is thus:

Number of Dice / Cp Cost
1 /1
2 /2
3 /4
4 /8
5 /16
etc

Skills will be capped at a maximum of 5 dice to avoid mass rolling, though Hit Points can continue to be raised past this point.

Actions

Actions are a simple test where a difficulty is given (a number 1-5) and the character must roll a number of dice equal to their relevent skill, say a character has Climb 3D then they would roll 3 dice when attempting to climb something. Sometimes this can be an opposed roll (such as a guard searching a room and a character trying to hide from them) in which case both characters would roll their relevent skill dice and the one who scores more successes would be successful.

In combat this system remains the same, with characters needing to score a number of successes equal to the targets Def (which is initially 1 + their armour bonus, to be discussed later). This is not an opposed roll, as might be logical, as this leads to too much dice rolling and would necessitate the presence of an 'Evade' skill which has in the past proven itself to be so powerful as to be necissary in opposed combat rolls.

Factors affecting action rolls and some examples will be included in the next post, but that's all for now.